Memo From The VP of Youth Marketing

I am pleased to report success which far exceeds our most generous early projections. The youth of this day and age are the perfect for our uses. They are malleable. They can be bent and folded to fill almost any use we can find for them. Honestly, the permutations seem to be endless. These children are the perfect consumer vessels. We have them by the nose. We can lead them anywhere.

The key to leading the youth is convincing them they are not being led. Children and teenagers in particular will do almost anything if you convince them it is there own idea. Every adolescent wants to be different, but they all conform. Have you looked out from your hundredth story corner office recently and observed these teens. There are about four different groups all of which feature children who are pretty much indistinguishable from each other within the group. I take a particular pleasure in the group I have dubbed the Ravens. The kids have other names for the group. It has elements of punk, goth, renaissance fairs, and what some nitwit has dubbed emo. You may recognize these children. If you have seen one, you have seen them all. They travel in packs, three or more children with jet black hair falling across their faces. Most amazing of all is they all wear woman’s pants, even the males. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell even the sex of these children. From the back they all look the same. (This has quite honestly led to some conflicting confused feelings within myself, but this memo is no place for any personal revelations.)

From the outside these children are almost impossible to market to. They present a monolithic façade, impossible to penetrate from without. However, once inside their group they can be molded to any shape you desire. Tell me to get them to start wearing bow ties, you will probably see it on MTV within the hour.

You see, I am inside.

Please, I know when you read this you will scoff. I can imagine you choking on your thirty year old scotch. You, obviously, want to know how I got inside, how I got groups of conformist disaffected youths to accept me, a forty five year old Harvard MBA. The answer is easy. They have never actually met me. I am their friend only via the internet. I have a MySpace account. Actually, I have been operating an average of eight accounts at any given time. My most common is under the name DAarC&An*gEL. Why the terrible punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, you ask? The simple answer is kids today are stupid. The more pertinent answer is that I need to maintain credibility with the youths. I must appear, at least on-line, as one of them. My page has a black layout and my profile picture is nothing but a black and white photograph of a black boot with a needless amount of buckles floating in a rancid pond. I have over 800 hundred friends, none of which I have actually met. I communicate with them via comment boards and bulletins. I can start trends. I can lead. I have sway.

As an added bonus, I have managed to get these teens to actually enjoy taking surveys. No sensible person enjoys taking these surveys, but these kids are practically addicted to it. I am slowly molding them to become the most marketing controlled generation in industry history. Through extensive surveying I am zoning in on exactly what they want and how they think. I am slowly fazing in more marketing centric questions into the surveys. Now sandwiched between questions about your BFF and who was the last person you kissed, I plop in questions such as: Pepsi or Coke. And the children respond. They will answer anything in these surveys. We have almost unlimited access. Soon we will have complete control over these children. We will rule the future.

Shalom